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Who wouldn't like some relief from the onerous burdens of manually managing employees' desktop devices, which now include not just office PCs but also laptops, notebooks, tablets and smartphones? That's what cloud desktops, also known as hosted virtual desktops (HVD)or desktops-as-a-service (DaaS), offers.

The idea is to maintain a "desktop image" of each employee's apps and data as well as the personalized look and feel of their desktop environment in a central data repository, accessible at will by the employee. While companies can deploy virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI) themselves, many are considering outsourcing it to a cloud-based service provider for simplicity and subscription-based pricing.

For channel partners, there is an opportunity to sell cloud desktops by first understanding the benefits and matching them to customers' needs.

Understanding Benefits

Cloud desktops offer customers a host of business such as:

Reduced management hassles. With DaaS, your customers escape all kinds of desktop management tasks — and the time and costs that go with them. There are no more upgrades and patching, no all-nighters when it's time to add an app and no more help desk hassles.

Flexibility and scalability. Since DaaS is a cloud service, your customers can start small. The right DaaS provider will offer a trial so your customers can do a proof-of-concept before committing to a DaaS service. And users always have the flexibility to scale up or down. This reduces deployment complexity while improving management, security and compliance.

Improved desktop security. As a cloud service, DaaS keeps your customers' data more secure than it is in traditional desktop environments — even as individual employee desktop images are deployed and removed on-demand to virtually any device, including employee-owned, anywhere these workers may be with Internet access.

Easier, safer mobility. Mobility/BYOD is easily accomplished since data security is built into the DaaS cloud architecture.

Reduced bandwidth demands. Given the right architecture, DaaS requires less bandwidth. When users connect to their cloud desktops, the entire screen is painted, but as they continue working, only the pixels that change are transmitted back, so most bandwidth use is downstream.